Problem: In history class, the girl to boy ratio is $9$ to $8$. If there are $32$ boys, how many girls are there?
Answer: A ratio of $9$ girls to $8$ boys means that there is a group of $9$ girls for every group of $8$ boys. If there are $32$ boys, then there are $4$ groups of $8$ boys each. Because we know the ratio is $9:8$ , there must be $4$ groups of $9$ girls each. There is a total of $36$ girls in history class.